6 October 2016: Joint JSC/MAI Seminar by Professor Seongbin Hwang

On 6 October 2016, the JSC joined forces with the Monash Asia Institute to host a seminar by Professor Seongbin Hwang of Rikkyo University.

Title: Sleeping Together with Different Dreams?: Japanese Media’s Gaze and Representation of Chinese Tourists

Abstract

There has been a significant increase of news reports that feature Chinese tourists in Japan since 2012, when Japanese government started monetary easing to significantly devalue the Japanese Yen. However, it is a very peculiar phenomenon to have so many news reports focusing on tourists from a specific nation, China. Why does the Japanese media and its digital public fix their eyes on the Chinese tourists, not the Koreans, the Taiwanese or the European tourists? Based on the findings from the analysis, this study argues that the gaze itself by Japanese media and its public on the Chinese tourists can be explained not only as a mechanism of China and the Chinese, but also as a process of construction of Japanese as the national subject, distinguished and differentiated from the other, the Chinese. In the process, the relation between the viewer and the viewed has been reversed: the viewed were not the Chinese tourists, but the Japanese. By gazing them through the various papers and monitors, what was actually looked at was the self, the Japanese and the undoubtedness of “us” and “our superiority” over the other, the Chinese. As for mutual penetration between the traditional media and the digital media space, there are something definitely shared through the dynamics of discourse, despite the diversity of the gaze and positionalities that are found both in the traditional media and the digital media space. Again, through the discursive practices that are analyzed here, it has been observed that honne 本音 space and its power has been widened and salient in the geography of news media and public opinion in Japan.